Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: A Content Analysis of Conservative and Liberal Media on Abortion Legislation in the United States, 2020–2024
Exploring Sentiment, Framing, and State-Level Policy Intersections in U.S. News Coverage
Abstract
This blog investigates how abortion is framed in the media by analyzing coverage from two ideologically opposed outlets: Fox News and The New York Times. Using text and sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and geographic policy data from the Guttmacher Institute, we examine shifts in media narratives before and after the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Introduction
Long a topic of debate across law, medicine, gender, and religion, abortion remains one of the most polarizing issues in American public life. That polarization deepened in June 2022, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that had established a constitutional right to abortion. The decision unsettled not only the legal framework around abortion, but also the broader discourse surrounding it. As states move in sharply different directions, media coverage has had to grapple with new divisions, new language, and new stakes.
At its core, the public debate still turns on a simple but deeply charged question: is abortion good or bad? How that question gets answered—or even framed—depends heavily on where one looks. News coverage of abortion varies sharply by ideological leaning. Conservative media outlets often emphasize religious and legal arguments, focusing on fetal personhood, state-level bans, and moral appeals (Jenssen 2013). In contrast, liberal media frequently frame abortion in terms of bodily autonomy, healthcare access, and gender justice, while highlighting the disproportionate impact of abortion restrictions on marginalized communities (Rohlinger 2015).
In this blog, we examine how abortion is framed by two ideologically distinct media outlets: Fox News and The New York Times. These platforms were selected for their national prominence, wide readership, and well-documented political leanings—Fox News is widely recognized as a conservative outlet, while The New York Times is identified as liberal-leaning (Mitchell et al. 2020; Pew Research Center 2014).
We complement this analysis with geographic policy data from the Guttmacher Institute, a leading research organization on reproductive health. Using tools such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and spatial comparison, we explore how media narratives align with state-level abortion laws and how discourse evolves in response to shifting legal landscapes.
A First Look at the Coverage
We collected a total of 3168 abortion-related news articles for this analysis. Of these, 1739 were published by Fox News and the remaining 1429 by The New York Times, spanning from early 2020 through late 2024. Together, these articles provide a window into how two major media outlets approached abortion coverage across a period of significant legal and political change.
To trace how attention fluctuated over time, we first examined monthly trends in article publication. Both Fox News and The New York Times exhibited visible surges in abortion-related reporting across the 2020–2024 period. While our primary focus is on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and its aftermath, earlier spikes in coverage are also notable. Attention intensified sharply in September 2021 with the enactment of Texas’s SB8 “heartbeat bill”, surged again in May 2022 when Politico leaked the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs, and peaked in June 2022 when the Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade.
Beyond the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, two additional peaks in abortion-related media coverage align with major electoral moments. The first appears in November 2022, during the U.S. midterm elections, when abortion rights were a central issue on state ballots across the country. Notably, Fox News overtook The New York Times in article volume — a reversal from earlier months when The Times had led during key judicial moments. This surge in Fox’s reporting likely reflects heightened partisan framing around abortion’s political salience, especially in contested states.
A second uptick occurs in August 2023, during the Ohio special election, when voters decided whether to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments. The measure was widely understood as a proxy battle over abortion rights. While both outlets covered the vote, the media response was more subdued than in 2022 — perhaps due to its more localized scope despite national implications.
The most recent spike emerges in late 2024, with The New York Times reclaiming the lead in coverage volume. This increase likely corresponds with renewed national focus on abortion in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where reproductive rights once again became a central campaign issue.
While monthly patterns highlight media reactions to key events, they don’t fully capture the broader arc of attention. To provide a cumulative perspective, we plotted the running total of abortion-related articles over time. Although The New York Times often displayed sharper monthly peaks, the cumulative view reveals a different pattern: over the long term, Fox News produced a significantly larger volume of abortion-related coverage. Following the Dobbs decision, both outlets showed a sharp rise in article counts, but Fox News continued publishing abortion-related content at a faster pace. By the end of 2024, Fox News had amassed a much larger body of coverage compared to The New York Times.
A Calendar of Changing Narratives
To understand how language and sentiment around abortion shifted in the media before and after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, we mapped article AFINN sentiment scores across the two major outlets in a calendar heatmap format spanning 2020 to 2024.
Since we’ve been talking about how Fox News devoted a large volume of coverage to abortion, let’s first take a closer look at the tone of that coverage.
While Fox News consistently produced abortion-related articles throughout the 2020–2024 period, its emotional tone varied more subtly than expected. Most days register as light red or pale blue, which indicates slightly negative or slightly positive sentiment, with fewer extreme spikes than one might assume for such a polarizing topic.
In 2022, around the time of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, we observe scattered patches of deeper red and blue. However, rather than clustering tightly around key events, these peaks appear spread out across weeks.
Interestingly, sentiment remained relatively stable in 2023 and 2024, with more diffuse tonal variation. This could imply that while the political salience of abortion persisted, the emotional framing of Fox News coverage settled into a more routine cadence post-Dobbs.
After exploring how Fox News covered abortion in both volume and tone, it’s worth asking: how does The New York Times compare?
Surprisingly, it’s The New York Times that reads as more restrained. In contrast to Fox’s more visibly fluctuating sentiment, the Times displays a remarkably steady emotional cadence in its abortion coverage from 2020 through 2024. Most days are washed in muted reds and pale blues. There is consistently neutral or mildly toned language across the board.
The only noticeable deviation appears in spring 2022, just before the Supreme Court officially decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Being a liberal-leaning outlet, and one generally supportive of abortion rights, we expected the New York Times to lean more negative in tone around the Dobbs decision. So it’s surprising to see a spike in positive sentiment in the weeks before the ruling.
That moment of optimism might feel out of place given the looming loss of constitutional protections — but it likely reflects the way the stories were framed: not with defeat, but with mobilization. Articles during that time may have highlighted state-level protections, legal challenges, or grassroots organizing, which could register as “positive” in sentiment scoring, even if the context was defensive or reactive.
For example, an article celebrating the swift passage of abortion protections in certain states might score as “positive” based on language even though it was prompted by a national-level loss. Similarly, a story framing a restrictive abortion law as “historic” or “a major success” (even if opposed editorially) could also register as positive if the wording carried emotional approval.
Even as article volume rises again toward the end of 2024, likely tracking with presidential election season, the emotional register stays steady. The New York Times seems to maintain its editorial evenness throughout.
Running the Narrative Race
To visualize how The New York Times’ framing of abortion evolved over time, we animated the top bigrams appearing in abortion-related articles each month from 2020 to 2024.
In early 2020, bigrams like health care, pro life, and reproductive rights were prominent, reflecting a healthcare- and ideologically-focused framing of abortion. In September 2021, with Texas’s SB8 law going into effect, terms like texas law and planned parenthood surged.
By May and June 2022, during the leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the eventual Dobbs decision, legal terms like overturn roe and court decision became prominent, marking a shift to more court-centric framing of abortion discourse.
Following the Dobbs decision, phrases like overturn roe and court decision remained dominant. At the same time, healthcare-focused language persisted with health care, while ballot measures rose to prominence during state-level campaigns in Kansas and Ohio.
The presence of terms like 12 weeks, 15 weeks, shield laws, and aid access reflects the growing complexity of abortion policy post-Roe, especially surrounding medication abortion and interstate protections.
Overall, we see how The New York Times coverage adapted in real time to political events—shifting from national healthcare debates to increasingly legal and rights-based discourse.
We did the similar thing for Fox News.
We consistently see health care as a primary focus each year, but especially in 2020, there was a heightened emphasis on public care, with frequent mentions of phrases like affordable care, care access, and medical progress.
A more narrative-driven framing emerges at the start of 2021, with top bigrams in February 2021 such as lives matter and killed babies, followed by moral evil and spiritual harm in April and May. While 2020 centered more on medicine, public health, and social institutions impacted by abortion laws, 2021 marks a shift toward individual experiences and the moral and social opinion surrounding abortion.
In 2022, health care continues to dominate coverage. However, throughout 2021, there is an uptick in religious framing, with terms like religious freedom and almighty god appearing in articles.
After the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022, the vocabulary broadens substantially. Bigrams range from medical care and faith leaders to legal persons, criminal penalties, rape incest, and shame.
This wider thematic spread reflects the surge in media attention and public discourse in the lead-up to and aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade—capturing debates around health care, law, religion, and personal trauma in equal measure.
What’s Next?
With everything ramping up toward the end of the semester (finals, projects, life), there are still a few things we want to finish up.
We’re planning to run topic modeling (basically like clustering, but for text) by media outlet and pre-/post-Dobbs, then generate word clouds to help visualize recurring themes. We also want to create a U.S. state-level abortion ban map using data from the Guttmacher Institute to show geographic patterns in post-Dobbs restrictions.
We’re also hoping to add more annotations to our graphs to mark key policy changes across the timeline again using Guttmacher’s policy tracker to help explain some of the sharper shifts in language or focus.
Lastly (and maybe a stretch, but we’ll see), we’re exploring how to make the animated bar graphs interactive, so viewers can pause, replay, or jump to specific months.
References
Jenssen, M. M. P. (2013), “Broadcast news and abortion: The effects of conservative narratives on the reproductive health debate,” PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mitchell, A., Jurkowitz, M., Oliphant, J. B., and Shearer, E. (2020), “Americans are divided by party in the sources they turn to for political news,” Pew Research Center.
Pew Research Center (2014), “Political polarization and media habits.”
Rohlinger, D. A. (2015), Abortion politics, mass media, and social movements in america, Cambridge University Press.